Dear Tig,
I'm an agency account director on a fairly sizable national media account. Last week I was approached by one of the mid-level client marketing managers about possibly joining the agency. I feel damned if I do and damned if I don't. If I hire him, the client management might be angry. If I don't hire him, he might be angry, and he's one of our main client contacts. Any advice? Oh, and he's a semi-decent guy, but probably doesn't have the experience we'd normally look for.
Thanks, Dido
Dear Dido,
It's not uncommon for client-side contacts to fall for the lifestyle of the agency, underestimating its downsides. All those client lunches and fraternizing with the production staff can lead one to believe that agency life is akin to an episode of “Just Shoot Me.” (Of course they don't realize it's much closer to “Absolutely Fabulous.”)
It's one thing to then go out and try to get an agency job, it's quite another to try to get hired by the agency you currently work with. This is, sort of, a form of flattery for your agency, but you are right to recognize the perils. I've had this same thing happen to me twice, so my advice will be based on some anecdotal experience.
In the first instance, my boss told the client-cum-colleague that, sorry, our agency had a strict policy about not hiring people from clients. What this client didn't know was that the policy was instituted the night before the conversation. This seemed to work out pretty well, although it involved the potential liability of the client eventually discovering that the policy had been tailor-made for him.
In the second instance, we were much more honest with the client, telling him that while we very much enjoyed working with him on the client side, there was more to agency qualifications than having worked with one—he needed more and different skills and experiences to come over at the level he desired. This didn't go over so well. I won't say that he had a vendetta against us from then on, but he certainly did us no favors subsequently.
The conclusion I draw from these experiences tells me it might be more rational to fend him off with a “policy,” but my instincts still tell me it might be better in the long run if you just come clean with him. And under no circumstances let anyone else in the agency know of the query and rejection.
The greatest trouble comes not from bad blood created when you reject him, but rather from the cumulative shame that builds up in his mind if he assumes that each time he meets with the agency subsequently, the junior staff might be snickering behind their hands.
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Dear Tig,
I am starting out on my own as a marketing consultant. Do you have any advice I can use to price my services? The key is that I am working with first time entrepreneurs who need my expertise but don't have a lot of money. Please help!
Indy
Dear Indy,
Not knowing precisely the services you're providing, I can give you some general guidelines and advice.
- Clients will often judge the value of your services based on how much it costs. No matter how non-intuitive, the more you charge, the more value they will see.
- You can always lower your prices, but raising them is near impossible. In the least, raising prices makes each client reconsider the relationship.
- First time entrepreneurs are fun to work with, but they have a low success rate when it comes to making a return on equity they offer. Cash is king.
- Timing of project proposals can have an enormous effect on how much a consultant can charge. When a company has extra hands at the ready, consultants find it hard to get contract rates above low levels. When resources are tight, though, they can make their services more dear.
- Consultants can generally charge a rate higher than it would cost to have an employee do similar work. A premium of 20 to 100 percent of internal labor costs might serve as a useful average range, as the employer doesn't have to worry about health care, liability insurance and scads of other overhead elements.
